298 KANSAS CILY REVIEW OF SCIENCE, 
Cognate and suggested by the foregoing has been a more subtile but very 
powerful influence,—discouragement. The lack of organizing and recuperative 
faculty in the Indian has been frequently remarked. He seems incapable of 
unintermitted activity and complex combinations. Even periods of success are 
with him, inevitably followed by long lapses of relaxation and almost demoraliza- 
tion, when all his energies of both mind and body seem unstrung and insuscepti- 
ble of reanimation. Much more is this the case in the presence of a long series 
of disasters and discouragements. More or less this fact of a general dispirited- 
ness is become prevalent among all the Indians of our present territory. It may 
not at first acquaintance be noticeable, for as occasion requires the Indian can be 
a diplomat of no mean order; but to one long familiar with them in their daily 
life and thought it is a most impressive and unavoidable conviction that they are 
disheartened. Their ambition as a race is fast disappearing and their hope almost 
perished. In intimate intercourse they make no secret of acknowledging it. 
The first chief of one of the most important of the tribes dwelt with a peculiar 
earnestness upon this fact in a final interview between himself and the writer 
two years since, and his mind was the mind of the many. It is exactly this 
unf rtunate mental status that is working lamentable results upon many of the 
Indian tribes, while in this attitude a quite ordinary ailment frequently proves 
fatal. A slight epidemic will carry off great numbers. Children that grow up 
receive as their most direct inheritance this incubus of hopelessness and are 
thereby quite incapacitated for aught of successful effort toward their own 
improvement or the amelioration of the condition of their posterity. The tem- 
perament of the Indians has become uniformly melancholic, and those among 
them, who possess the most of native ability and from whom we should naturally 
expect the best and largest efforts for good, are the very ones in whom this type 
of temperament is most emphatically present. I do not remember to have seen 
this phase of Indian character particularly noticed; but it deserves careful con- 
sideration from all who are sincerely interested in their welfare and advancement. 
Perhaps it would be as well not to inquire too curiously into the course of events 
that has brought about this special mental attitude in them. The exact truth 
might not be entirely flattering to our humanitarianism. 
Of the deleterious efforts of strong drink and of certain forms of disease 
communicated to the Indians by the whites it seems scarcely necessary to speak. 
Their victims are to be numbered by thousands. The sale of liquors to the 
Indians is now by the wise, but inefficiently administered policy of the govern- 
ment somewhat checked; but it is by no means stopped. One of the most 
frequent cases before the federal courts, sitting in the vicinity of any Indian 
reservation is that of the United States vs. A B for selling liquor to Indians. By 
various avenues considerable quantities continue to reach them and its use still 
operates to their no small detriment. No doubt it is only a very broad euphe- 
mism that the stuff thus illegitimately bartered to the Indians may be dignified by 
the name of liquor; for in more than one instance it has been found by actual 
